Forgive my late comment on it, but in early November, PBS' Frontline did a fantastic program titled The Confessions. If you haven't heard about the case (I hadn't), I'd really recommend watching or listening to the program, but to boil it down as short as possible, a woman named Michelle Moore-Bosko was raped and murdered in her Virginia apartment in 1997, and through a series of bad police and prosecutorial decisions, seven US sailors were wrongly dragged into it, and four were ultimately convicted on rape or murder charges and imprisoned by Virginia. They were eventually freed on a partial clemency by Governor Tim Kaine in 2009, having spent most of 12 years in prison.
All this happened despite the eventual (but still timely enough) confession of acting alone by a known sexually violent man who had no association with the accused sailors, and had the only DNA from the crime scene. The first sailor was implicated just by the random suspicious comment of someone in Michelle's building (where he also lived) during initial police canvassing and after he was induced to (falsely) confess by sheer psychological wear-down, one by one additional sailors were pulled in as each would be brought in, grilled for extended times by one detective with a long record of extracting confessions, and when their DNA did not actually match the crime scene, they were coerced to name additional people involved and re-state their confessions to match a growing list of suspects, which ultimately reached 8. The case took numerous absurd twists and turns and really the program does an excellent job showing how the State's case against the seven (three never convicted) strained credulity by the end, despite the confessions.
PBS covers many aspects of this preposterous travesty of justice, because it is obvious that many flaws in the criminal justice system aligned to create such a massive error. There is no monocausal explanation, a bad cop, bad prosecutors, bad supervisors, bad Judges and sloppy defence lawyers all played significant parts in the result, but if I had to name the factor which, if absent, would have prevented the outcome while still leading to the eventual conviction of the actual murderer, it is the Death Penalty.
Last month, Frank Sterling was exonerated by DNA evidence after being incarcerated 18 years for a crime he did not commit. Sterling was wrongfully convicted of murdering an elderly woman in Rochester, New York in 1988. His conviction was based entirely on a false confession. In the meantime the actual killer remained free, and six years later he murdered four-year-old Kali Poulton. This tragedy leaves no question that addressing the flaws in our criminal justice system that lead to wrongful convictions is a public safety imperative.
Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? What would it take to get you to confess to a crime? For Christopher Ochoa, it took twenty hours of questioning and badgering and threats to get him to falsely confess to the murder of a woman in Austin, Texas. As a result, he spent twelve years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Most people find it hard to understand how anyone could ever confess to a crime they did not commit. But it happens over and over again. False confessions are a well-documented reality, especially among vulnerable populations like juveniles and the mentally-impaired. Of all the DNA exonerations nationwide, false confessions occur in over 20 percent of them.
Last week, two major newspapers highlighted two different cases where the confessions of the defendants had been called into question.
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